StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/29/01

The News – 07/09/01

Disposable Tech

You know something has really entered the mainstream of American life when folks don’t feel bad about throwing it away. It happened to pocket handkerchiefs (Kleenex®); it happened to lighters (Cricket , 1961); it happened to cameras (Fuji, 1986). And now it’s happened to cell phones. Soon it’ll be laptops.

There are several companies making disposable or recyclable phones today.Dieceland Technologies has designed an extremely simple, call-only phone made of coated paper. Most of its circuitry is printed on the paper surface, with the exception of a few circuit chips and a battery source. The phones range from $10 for 60 minutes to $30 models with more features. Each can be thrown away, replenished with airtime or maybe even recycled. The company has more than 100 million units on order. That’s right, 100 million cheap, disposable phones hitting the streets soon from just one vendor. A paper laptop is on the drawing board.

Telespree’s phones are a bit more durable, and are made to be recycled. The AirClip portion holds the battery and number of minutes purchased. Consumers can purchase more air and battery time in stores that carry the phone. The phone is also call-only, but Telespree is working on one that can also receive calls. Telespree’s big innovation is the lack of a dialing pad; their phone is voice activated, employing technology from Nuance Communications .

A third company, Hop-On.com , recently inked a deal with fiber backbone provider Williams Communications that has Williams carrying all Hop-On’s long distance traffic for the next three years. Hop-On’s phone is also extremely simple – only two buttons – and comes with 60 minutes of talk time. The consumer uses a hands-free earpiece and dials via voice. The phone supports the GSM, CDMA, and TDMA protocols, but it’s not clear if that’s all in one phone or not. The company is developing a biodegradable plastic it will soon use to fabricate its cases. Hop-On is also working on call receiving services as well as a package of informational services featuring sports, weather, stocks and entertainment. Hop-On’s parent company is involved in Internet casino gaming, so we can imagine what the entertainment might involve. Despite the Williams deal, the future is uncertain for Hop-On. The publicly traded company has a market cap of $376,000 and shares traded on the pink sheets at $0.18.

Wireless carriers spend roughly $150 in cell phone subsidies for each new subscriber, according to Current Analysis . Prepaid plans are intended primarily for those who fail a credit check and are typically much more expensive on a per-minute basis than monthly plans. Prepaid users typically are not loyal to a carrier and don’t commit to buying a regular amount of minutes. Analysts figure teens and seniors are two groups ripe for cheap phone sales.

So what can we learn from the disposable phone trend? Well, basically that services are more important than ever. Assuming the phones will remain feature lite – no Internet, no WAP, no J2ME, no buttons to push – obviously the strategy is increased wireless penetration. Yet no one is going to get rich on $10 phones, although if Dieceland sells 100 million of them, well, that ain’t hay. The real revenue stream is in serving the users of those phones. But, wait. If the future trend for wireless phones is going to be stripped down phones with extremely simple user interfaces (UIs), what’s that mean for all the wonderful applications people are hoping to build?

A certain percentage of people who would otherwise buy the latest phone as their first phone will gravitate toward the simplicity and perceived cost savings of the disposable, especially once the phones can receive calls as well as place them. This means the penetration of the full-featured phones – the kind that need consultants to write apps for them – will necessarily suffer. Certainly, not everyone who would buy a disposable is a potential geek phone buyer. However, with handset sales no longer growing robustly, Nokia and others are counting on increasing penetration to maintain revenue.

On the other hand, let’s face it, the typical geek phone UI sucks. Converged PDA/phone combinations are only a little better. The simplicity angle of disposables just means more work programming the backend and some sort of voice interface like Nuance’s or TellMe’s . In some ways, this simplicity is more consistent with the usual function of a phone, to receive and give audio information. You also don’t have to be adept at doing two things at once: looking at and using a visual display while talking on the phone.

So who will benefit, no matter whether the trend is to geek phones or disposables? Voice interface vendors and consultants. That’s the service component this particular disposable enables.

Acme Rental Fines Follow Up – Alert SNS Reader Andrew Hargreave passed along this update from Slashdot regarding an earlier news item reported in SNS. The Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection has ruled against Acme Rent-A-Car in their practice of fining car renters $150 per speeding infraction. The decision was based on the fact that Acme failed to properly word their contracts when they indicated that fines would be imposed for speeding. Dept. Commissioner Jim Fleming also stated that the practice of renters being fined is illegal. However, the practice of tracking vehicles with GPS is still a legal practice. So the Roadrunner wins the round . . . again.Slashdot

3G Problems in Japan: NTT DoCoMo will replace all 1,400 of its 3G wireless handsets (model N2001, made by NEC). The company claims this is not a recall. Company spokesman Takumi Suzuki said, "We are replacing handsets to improve their function, not because of technical problems." Right. DoCoMo has recalled more than 400,000 non-3G handsets over the last year or so due to quality problems.BBC

Broadband Density: America is not the most wired country in the world, at least as far as broadband is concerned, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. South Korea leads with 9.2 broadband connections per 100 inhabitants, compared with 2.25 in America and a measly 0.08 in Britain. Canada even beats the US, while Austria is the most connected country in Europe. Bad execution is blamed for lack of penetration in many countries. Germany’s Deutche Telekom signed up 630,000 broadband subscribers last year, but only managed to hook up 135,000 of them.The Economist

Hosting in Trouble? Once upon a bubble, Web hosting companies were the darlings of Wall Street. They were the “picks and shovels” guys providing the infrastructure for the Internet gold rush. Now one of the biggest of them all, Exodus, is in trouble and may not make it. Their stock plunged 65 percent recently, and they’re obviously taking on water. So much for picks and shovels. Businesses should ask a lot of questions about their hosting company in this difficult environment.Internet World

One Fish, Two Fish: OK, I had to headline this item about Bluefish with a reference to the Dr. Seuss classic. Bluefish Wireless recently launched infrared access points for Palm PDA owners in Laptop Lane outlets in Chicago’s O’Hare and Atlanta’s Hartsfield International airports. During a three-month trial, users can download news from Reuters via AvantGo and purchase books, CDs, flowers, and wine. As if that’s not enough, users can earn United, American, or Delta frequent-flier miles from their purchases.Internet World

What a Difference a Letter Makes: You may be familiar with the wireless LAN standard 802.11b, otherwise known as WiFi. It’s the de facto home wireless LAN standard backed by 3Com, Apple, Cisco, Intel, and Nortel. You may have wondered, “What’s up with the ‘b’? Is there an ‘a’?” Yes, there’s an ‘a’ and also several other alphabetic variations. A current problem with 802.11b is its use of the unlicensed 2.4GHz frequency, the same frequency occupied by Bluetooth, digital cordless phones, and even your microwave oven. The 802.11a standard moves to the relatively empty 5Ghz band and promises more than five times the 11Mbps throughput of WiFi. But that’s not all. The other variations of 802.11 also could be important, especially to business, in the next few years. See the article for a roundup.The Standard

The Drive to Improve: Next month Maxtor will begin shipping a 100-gigabyte PC drive, the industry’s biggest to date. Costing $300, the drive will hold one hundred billion bytes of data, enough to store, for example, more than 25,000 MP3 music files or a hundred million memos you can’t remember where you filed.Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

Microsoft to Drop SmartTags: Everyone’s favorite monopoly has decided to leave out a controversial feature from the upcoming release of Microsoft XP, their next operating system. SmartTags work in Internet Explorer and allow the software giant to link any word on any Web page to a site of their choosing. Despite being pretty annoying, this technique, which Microsoft is not abandoning forever, obviously would give it tremendous marketing power. Just what they need: more power.C|Net

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/26/01

The News – 06/26/01

Here’s To Looking Up Your Old Address, Part 2

Yesterday we examined the problem of finding people in cyberspace. No one wants a white pages of email addresses because of spam, but it’s becoming harder and harder to find old acquaintances and business contacts in an increasingly freelance world.

Today, we’ll look at a related problem: network addresses. Any device connected to a network needs one so you can find it. When you go to www.amazon.com , for example, the Domain Name System translates that into the IP address 208.33.218.15. As billions of devices come online (wireless phones and PDAs, houses, refrigerators, microwaves) the numbering scheme used to assign network addresses, known as IPv4, will run out of addresses, as soon as next year or as far off as 2010. Computer scientists have been preparing for this eventuality by readying the next generation of Internet addressing, known as IPv6.

You’d think that a scheme that increases the address space from 4 billion to 340 undecillion * and allows users to set up priority circuits for time-critical traffic like audio and video would be an easy sell.

* (That improbably large number is 2 to the 128th power or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456; enough to assign IP addresses to all the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth, according to one analyst. If the address space of IPv4 is equivalent to one inch, IPv6 is equivalent to the diameter of the Milky Way.)

But IPv6 is not an easy sell. Just like evolution, the Holocaust, and global warming, there are those who say it ain’t necessarily so.

The culprits, as always, are money and politics. First, Microsoft, a member of the IPv6 forum, refused to support IPv6 in Windows 2000. Then, they declined to support it in the upcoming Windows XP. Too experimental, they claimed, yet Sun has IPv6 support in Solaris 8. When the 107 companies in the IPv6 Forum meet at the Global IPv6 Summit Seoul, Korea, on July 3-6, 2001, there’ll be even more gnashing of teeth. At the most recent summit in May, Cisco announced it was supporting IPv6 across its product line.

Converting to IPv6 is not an easy thing. For one thing, every router in the world needs to be replaced or upgraded. For another, every operating system or other network-enabled piece of software also needs to be upgraded. (Can you see part of Microsoft’s rationale in not building in IPv6 support, now?) Plus you need to make sure the old networks can communicate with the new during the transition.

Networks in Europe and Asia are quickly embracing the new standard, in part because it is friendlier to wireless devices. But North American networks are dragging their feet, primarily due to cost, but also because we have 74 percent of the IP addresses and low wireless Web penetration, and so have no reason to panic, yet.

Another reason is the popularity of Network Address Translating (NAT) firewalls. By convention, you only need a unique IP address if there’s a chance other computers could have the same address. Many corporate networks assign arbitrary IP addresses for use within their organizations, and then use NAT to assign the same external IP address to all users when they venture out onto the Internet. This works well for corporations and ISPs, but when we hit a billion cell phones, the NAT technique is likely to get strained. Besides, NATs make end-to-end security on the Internet a real pain in the butt, and IPv6 has built-in security.

Still, there are signs of life, even in the US, where Japanese telecom NTT has already established an IPv6 network that connects to others in Japan and Europe.

So what should businesses do about these twin problems: finding people and finding computing devices? With the new .name domain name due out by year end, perhaps people will buy domain names and thus consolidate their access. However, only geeks like me (www.mikeellsworth.com ) are likely to jump on that possibility. Perhaps the big email databases will eventually get it right and be able to accurately locate business people whose cards you’ve lost. Maybe unified messaging will solve the problem, at least for folks who stay put at one company. Or perhaps some entrepreneur will come up with an ingenious solution.

As far as finding and addressing the torrent of new computing devices rushing onto the scene, businesses making new networking purchases should make sure they are IPv6 upgradeable. You should also plan to include some IPv6 conversion money in your networking budget over the next few years. And you should also realize that conversion to IPv6 networks will likely cause Internet outages over the next several years.

Whatever the solution, we will fulfill the ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

Are They Kidding? The World Bank has had some problems holding its meetings lately. Seems that folks who disagree with their policies have a tendency to show up and manacle themselves in human chains and otherwise behave badly. So now the WB has decided to hold its next meeting online, figuring, I guess, that this will somehow decrease the amount of disruption. Hello? Can you say denial of service attack? The WB plans to hold email discussions of online speeches and other Webcast events. “To have 200 academics protected by 4,000 police would have been absurd,” said a spokeswoman for the World Bank. So they’d prefer 200 academics protected by 4,000 anti-cracker forces? The meeting is next week. Should be interesting.BBC

Moore’s Law Still In Business: Intel Chairman of the Board Emeritus, Gordon Moore, predicted many years ago that transistor density on microprocessor chips would double every 18 months. In 1993, he reconsidered, saying there were limits beyond which chipmakers couldn’t go. Intel busted those limits in the late ‘90s, and now they’ve created experimental chips only a few atoms thick. This research will enable microprocessors containing a billion transistors, running at speeds approaching 20 gigahertz and operating at less than one volt in approximately 2007. But chances are good your computer will still take 2 minutes to boot up!Intel

The Gov Gets StarOffice: Sun announced that the US Department of Defense has adopted 25,000 units of StarOffice, Sun’s free, Open Source MS Office clone. StarOffice works on UNIX and Windows machines and bundles word processing, spreadsheet, mail and other productivity tools. It’s Sun’s attempt to hurt Microsoft where it lives, its Office cash cow. More than 5 million copies of the software have been downloaded. Nonetheless, the government adoption is a feather in Sun’s cap.Sun

Wireless Knowledge Gap: A recent study from Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) Telecoms, Europe found that 89 percent of US internet users with cell phones say that they are either “unaware” or feel “poorly informed” about wireless internet technology. This compares with 44 percent of Germans and 23 percent of Italians who feel “well informed” or “fairly informed.” Only 20 percent of US users sent messages via cell phone, vs. 90 percent of Europeans. In fact, email usage is down 5 percent in the UK due to increased Short Message Service (SMS) cell phone messages.eMarketer

In a Rental, No One Can Hear You Scream: OK, technology has officially gone too far. Acme Rent-a-Car used Global Positioning System GPS technology to track a Connecticut customer and then fined him $450 for speeding three times. Seems the company has a threshold of 79 mph, and their dangerous behavior policy is stated in bold at the top of the rental agreement. It’s only going to get worse, folks, as your wireless carrier will soon be able to track you wherever you go as well.C|Net

Most Manufacturers Use Trading Networks: The US Census surveyed 40,000 manufacturers and found 87.3 percent had at least one type of electronic network installed in their plant, with 65.9 percent saying that they operated two or more networks. EDI was the most popular, followed by the Internet.eMarketer

Serious Web Vulnerability in MS Server: Microsoft has acknowledged that its Internet Information Server (IIS) contains a serious flaw that could give crackers system level access. If you’re running IIS, MS has a patch availableZDNet

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/25/01

The News – 06/25/01

Here’s To Looking Up Your Old Address

There’s no denying that wireless is one of the hottest emerging technologies. Scarcely a day goes by without some breathless prediction of the growth of wireless devices. Some samples, which I used in my presentation at the CAMP Designing a Handheld Strategy for Your Enterprise conference in Chicago last week:

· 480 million mobile phone users today will become 1 billion by 2003

· US mobile phone users will spend more time on the wireless Internet (75 hours per year) than making wireless phone calls (30.2 hours) by 2010

· 34.4 million mobile Web users in Asia, an increase of 29 percent in 3 months

Sounds great, I guess, but in this brave new world of wireless interactivity, how are we going to find each other? This problem is twofold, comprising a human element – remembering everyone’s contact info – and a technical element – the Internet will be out of addresses, probably within the next year.

Let’s consider the human problem first. Remember how business cards used to look back in the day? Name, title, address, and phone number. Seen a business card recently? Name, title, address – some things don’t change – but also main office number, direct dial, pager, cell phone, FAX, email address and Web page address. We’re so connected we could scream! And, if you’re like me, it doesn’t end there: How many email addresses do you have? I have at least five, but I’m probably forgetting a few. How about phone numbers at home? I have seven.

Unified messaging promises to consolidate some of this clutter, but it’s not making tremendous inroads. The idea is to consolidate voice and data messages in a single mailbox and access methodology. Thus you could have a single phone number (voice and FAX) and a single email address, and they’d reach you wherever you are.

If you really needed multiple email addresses (one for work, one for home), you could always have them consolidated programmatically for delivery to a single device. Oh, wait. No, you can’t, because Research In Motion just received a patent on the technique of combining multiple email boxes for delivery to a single device. Their patent covers figuring out that emails have arrived from multiple addresses and rewriting the addressing and reply-to fields so you can reply from your device, which might be, for example, RIM’s Blackberry pager. RIM is currently suing Glenayre Electronics for infringing this less-than-a-month-old patent.

Now I don’t want to get off on a rant here, and I don’t have intimate knowledge of the patent, but from what I read at the US Patent Office , it hardly seems like a remarkable bit of programming. But I guess if Amazon can patent one click purchasing (involving the stunning technological breakthrough of saving your payment information for reuse), any obvious lame-brained hack can be patented. Not that that’s a bad thing.

Regardless, we’re going to need some way to contact folks that is independent of the access method. It would be nice to have a worldwide white pages of email addresses, but unscrupulous spammers make this an unworkable idea. And on services such as InfoUSA , WhoWhere , Yahoo People Search , and BigFoot , I couldn’t even find my own current email address (BigFoot had a bunch of my old ones).

Services such as iname.com and others attempt to market themselves as permanent email addresses, but you’re really at their mercy if they ever go out of business. There has even been a suggestion to base one’s email address on one’s Social Security number (please, no!) or other government identifier. I don’t think schemes like this will fly. It’s much more likely that people will be assigned a permanent phone number, perhaps with extensions to designate business from personal.

Any way you look at it, this is a burgeoning problem. Once your house or your refrigerator have an email address, it will be orders of magnitude worse.

Now, about those dwindling Internet addresses. We’ll address this problem in tomorrow’s SNS, but it looks like the solution, IPv6, is slow a-coming, and will cause a lot of pain before it’s in place. See you tomorrow.

This situation is a badly overgrown version of the way we designed products at HP during the neolithic era of electronics (the 1970s). Back then, we called the approach "next-bench" marketing. Today, you’d call it "nerd marketing." The key philosophy behind this approach is to take your newly minted idea for a product or feature, pop up from your chair, hang your arms over the cube wall, and ask the person next to you if your idea has merit. If that person answers yes, then you’ve obviously got a winner. If you get a negative response, then you probably didn’t explain it very well, so you try the person on the other side of your cube. Next-bench marketing may be fine for oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and similar items used by engineers and other geeks, but it doesn’t replace good market research when designing consumer products like information appliances.

This is a great description of what passes for marketing in many companies today. Not that that’s a bad thing.Microprocessor Watch

I Want This PDA: Mitac has released Bluetooth-equipped PDAs with color screens and wireless Internet access. The beauty part is Mitac supports either Windows CE or embedded Linux (for the geek in you). Based on an Intel StrongArm 206Mhz CPU, MiTAC’s High-End WinCE based color PDAs use a back-lit 3.8" color TFT LCD display, and include a Compact Flash slot.Twomobile

Paging Dick Tracy: Samsung has produced a CDMA2000 video-enabled telephone. It supports Video On Demand (VOD) and Audio On Demand (AOD) in 200,000 colors with a two-inch screen. The bad news? Only South Korea has 3G wireless CDMA2000 networks. Or you could move to Japan, where DoCoMo has “soft launched” their supposedly-delayed-till-yearend 3G service with Java-enabled Panasonic video phones (pictured).Twomobile

The Next Digital Divide: Futurist George Gilder is fond of referring to the last “digital divide,” which pitted centralized, multi-megaflop computing against personal computers. The conflict was resolved due to the abundance of transistors – PC makers could “waste” them in order to give people unshared computing resources. We all know who won. Now, Gilder analyst Bret Swanson says the next digital divide will be based on abundant bandwidth. With all the dark fiber (installed, but unused fiber runs) in the ground, the next winners will waste bandwidth to give everyone unshared broadband. I don’t know about you, but I find George Gilder a bit, well, breathless is I guess how I’d put it. Nonetheless, I believe there’s a lot of merit in his ideas. Check out the article for yourself and see what you think.Gilder Report

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/21/01

The News – 06/21/01

Watch How You Link!

An August 2000 court decision preventing cracker site www.2600.com from linking to the outlawed DeCSS DVD cracking code has thrown open the whole question of hyperlinking, the technique that forms the basis of the Web. DeCSS is a program that allows users to remove the Content Scrambling System (CSS) copy protection from DVD disks, enabling them to copy the digital information from hard drive to hard drive. The software has already been declared illegal, and now a judge has made a criminal of anyone who links to a site that hosts the program. Here’s the relevant section of the order:

[Defendant is prevented from] knowingly linking any Internet web site operated by them to any other web site containing DeCSS, or knowingly maintaining any such link, for the purpose of disseminating DeCSS.

Recently, a panel co-sponsored by the Freedom Forum and the Online News Association discussed the broad implications of this legal decision. Among these implications are the likelihood that businesses could get sued for hyperlinks to other sites, and sites could sue other sites that link to them. Also open to interpretation is making intermediate links. What if 2600 links to a site that itself links to the DeCSS code, for example? It is interesting to note that the New York Times, CNN, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other organizations linked to the DeCSS code as part of stories, but only 2600 was prosecuted.

This decision cannot be allowed to stand. The whole fabric of the Web would be irreparably damaged if businesses needed to assume liability for links off-site. Firms like StratVantage couldn’t maintain resource directories or other helpful lists of links. The Web, the most successful information sharing system ever developed, could wither and die because of one clueless judge.

Business owners should make their opposition to this ruling known. You can contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation for information on how to help with the appeal. It may gall conservative folks to be on the same side as liberal organizations like EFF, but this ruling is so wrong, everyone has a stake in overturning it. If you’re into civil disobedience, place this link on your site: http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS/ . It’s an intermediate link that, if you follow enough threads, will lead a user to the DeCSS code.

Thanks to alert SNS reader David Dabbs for bringing this issue to our attention.

Patent Copycat Case: In another intellectual property case that could affect businesses, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Festo v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Koygo Kabushiki, a case in which the appeals court trimmed a legal principal called the doctrine of equivalents. Patent holders claim this weakens patents. Festo initially was represented by Kenneth Starr, and now have retained Robert Bork to manage the high-profile case.ZDNet

Disinfect those Disks! Scientists in Spain have discovered a Central American fungus that eats CDs. The fungus from Belize devours the aluminum in the disk’s core. In a wonderful display of denial, Philips, the inventor of the compact disk, said the case was a freak incident probably caused by extreme weather conditions. But we bet no Philips employees fly Air Belize from now on (there’s lots of aluminum in airplanes).The Telegraph

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/12/01

The News – 06/12/01

Go With the Information Flow

Everything you know about computer interfaces is wrong, according to David Gelernter, noted computer author and thinker, and founder of Mirrorworlds Technology. The desktop metaphor was a revolutionary breakthrough in the ‘60s (yes, the ‘60s, when Douglas Englebart invented it and the mouse.) Almost 40 years later, the metaphor is worn out and unable to keep up with the demands of computing. The rise of small personal devices such as phones and PDAs has made the obsolescence of the desktop obvious. What we need, Gelerntner says, is a way of organizing information that is closer to the way our brains do it: in chronological order with a fast (well, relatively fast for those of us over 40) associative search engine.

Rather than dealing with information by conforming to computers, Gelernter wants computers that conform to the way we think. To accomplish this, Mirrorworlds has recently released Scopeware 2.0, which allows you to organize your life around streams, rather than a “standing pool of sludge,” as Gelernter calls current file systems.

The stream would be an all-inclusive electronic diary: every information item that entered your life would enter the stream at the same time. When you made plans for the future, you’d store the plans in the "future" of the stream. The stream could reclassify everything instantaneously. If you wanted to see all your zeppelin documents you would type "zeppelin," and all non-zeppelin-related documents would disappear, and you’d have a pure zeppelin stream. You’d rely on the powerful symbiosis among full-content-searching, easy browsing and time-order to find exactly what you wanted, fast. Emails, electronic images, and other information items would be first-class citizens of the stream, alongside documents and applications and anything else. In other words, this information management system would actually manage information, instead of gazing off into space while YOU managed information.

Scopeware allows companies or individuals to set up a stream which will contain all emails, word processing files, spreadsheets, PDFs, contacts, calendars – any of the electronic bits of information that currently rule our lives. Using sophisticated security, permissioning, and distribution technology, you can access the stream from any computer or any device, at least eventually.

Gelernter, whom you may be familiar with as a result of the Unabomber’s letter bomb attack on him in 1993, envisions a world in which we can forget all the arcane things we’ve learned about dealing with computers and concentrate on dealing with the information. Streams will be provided as a utility, like power and water, rather than being purchased in boxes that grow obsolete every 18 months.

Whether Mirrorworlds’ scheme pans out or not, you can expect some radical changes in the way you do computing over the next few years, what with dramatically increasing bandwidth and computing power, and the proliferation of computing devices.

It seems obvious that the primary computing metaphor, the desktop, will need to change. My feeling is there will be a variety of schemes to fit the variety of ways that people interact with information. I once had a colleague who filed everything by time, much the way Scopeware does. When she left, we couldn’t find anything, but it all was immediately and intuitively accessible for her. We’ve probably all known people with idiosyncratic filing methods. Chances are good, then, that the new computing environment won’t be a tyranny of standardization like the current one, but rather infinitely adaptable to the way people think.

Buzzword Alert: We’re all familiar with megabytes by now, and most will recognize gigabytes (1,024 megabytes). You may even know that a terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes and a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes. But now, for the first time, I’ve seen a number associated with the Internet that dwarfs them all: zettabytes. A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeroes. That’s the current estimate of how much information the Internet will contain by the end of the decade. Any bets on how long it will take to get to a googolplexbyte ?Dallas Morning News

NetZero and Juno Online Services, two ISPs who made their names with free Internet service, said they would merge to form a new company called United Online, expected to be the second biggest US ISP after AOL Time Warner’s America Online.WiredNews

It’s Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away: At least 54 US Internet companies closed in May, pushing the casualty total for the first five months of this year to 269, beyond the 222 total closings for all of 2000. According to Webmergers, a San Francisco research and advisory service, at least 493 Internet companies have shut down since Webmergers began tracking the phenomenon in January 2000. The company estimates that there are 7,000 to 10,000 substantial Web firms still in business.SFGate

Ferry Tale: Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard waxes eloquent on the topic of assessing broadband demand: “How accurate is it ever to gauge, say, traffic for a proposed bridge by counting ferry boats and swimmers? Forget last-mile as you know it today: clunky DSL or cable modem service. These are mere swimmers and ferry boats. The bridge will come when last-mile connections are easy to order (one phone call or Web click); quick to deliver (the very next day); always on (like electricity in, uh, 49 states); and cheap ($20 a month or less). When the dogs are served that, they’ll eat till they burst.”Forbes

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — The News – 06/07/01

The News – 06/07/01

The Ultimate Movie Machine?

It took a lot to get me to go to www.bmwfilms.com . Despite being a BMW owner, I am very allergic to the idea of any kind of advertising. I view my attention as a precious commodity that I don’t want to squander on commercial appeals. But I kept hearing this buzz about BMW Films, from the company direct mailing, from the (always muted) TV commercials, and from chatter on the Net. So, fine, I joined more than 200,000 other lemmings, went to the site, endured the massive downloads of the BMW Interactive Film Player and the Apple QuickTime player and the 77 MB movie itself. Even on my cable connection it took quite a bit of time. I watched the movie, The Follow, which is the third in the series. It was quite nice, although a little dark, and it played smoothly at a reasonable size on my monitor.

OK, I thought, what about the first two films. How do I see them? There was no indication in the BMW Film Player as to how to view anything other than high and low resolution versions of The Follow and its trailer. I go back to the Web site. It says I can download the BMW Film Player to watch the enhanced version of Ambush, the first film. But I don’t want to do that. My alternative is to see an un-enhanced streaming version. So I’m stuck with a really small version, and it hangs right at the climax of the film.

Frustrated, I read all the help, and go back to the player. And here’s where the point (and I do have one) comes in: Down at the bottom of the screen, which is mostly black, is the word, “Films.” I had long ago figured that had something to do with selecting the film to play, but had clicked it uselessly several times. Turns out there are invisible clickable areas to the right of that allow you to select the available films. When you move your cursor over these areas, a number appears, a sound effect fires, and a film thumbnail travels into view from the margin. Now that’s intuitive design.

BMW has obviously put a lot of money into this marketing effort. But they got me, a Beemer (or Bimmer if you are to be Germanically precise about it; a Beemer is a BMW motorcycle) enthusiast, ready to hang it up and never visit again because some artsy design idiot preferred an interface that was cool looking over one that was functional.

I’ve had an ongoing war with designers throughout my Web career, and I must say I am biased toward content and functionality. I really couldn’t care less what it looks like as long as it works. That’s the key: The doggone thing’s gotta work. People have got to be able to find it (content on sites that use Macromedia Flash exclusively doesn’t show up in search engines), and when they get there, they have to be able to use it or they’re gone. Businesses would do well to remember this when considering designs (such as all-Flash sites like this truly awful one from Balthaser ) that may be long on the eye appeal and short on the effectiveness. BMW forgot this and almost lost a viewer.

BTW, the second film, The Chosen, by Ang Lee, is easily the best of the four currently available films (although the newest, Guy Ritchie’s comic take on wife Madonna’s stardom, is the funniest.) I particularly like The Chosen’s chase, in which The Driver’s BMW is pursued by a Toyota, a Mercedes, a Ford, and a Jeep, all of which are outmaneuvered and out-powered by the Beemer.

Sun Microsystems announced the industry’s first implementation of the Electronic Business XML (ebXML) Registry/Repository specification, based on Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology. The ebXML specifications, which were developed through the joint efforts of OASIS and UN/CEFACT, were finalized last month.Sun

Home Depot is trying a new wireless handheld PalmOS-based scanner from 360commerce and Symbol to speed checkouts. Associates scan purchases while customers are in line; records are retrieved when they get to the register.RetailTech

Buzzword Alert: The private exchanges that I’ve been yammering about for more than a year have achieved buzzword status: They’ve been christened Private Trading eXchanges (PTX). You know a trend has arrived when the buzzword mongers get busy. A PTX is a private marketplace run by a single company for the benefit of its supply chain members. There’s a lot of talk these days about whether PTXs or B2B exchanges will prevail. My money’s on the PTXs. AMR recently predicted that $5.7 trillion in commerce would be transacted via the Internet by 2004, with most of it passing through a PTX.Stores

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 06/01/01

The News – 06/01/01

There’s a revolution a-brewing in retail. It’s called Scan-Based Trading, and if it really gets off the ground, every aspect of the supply chain of businesses involved in retail will be changed.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers defines SBT this way:

If you could somehow marry the retailer’s goal of not wanting to own inventory with the manufacturer’s goal of a just-in-time, no excess inventory supply chain, then you would have something. The key to this marriage would be to allow market demand to dictate the supply. And probably the best proxy we have in the market today for demand is capturing real-time consumer purchase activity.

In this union of marital bliss, a manufacturer would produce a product according to demand. It would be transported to the retailer’s shelves just in time to be picked up by a customer who would take the item to the checkout. The item would be scanned, the customer would pay, the manufacturer would be paid automatically, and a replacement order would be placed electronically. The retailer has no inventory investment, the manufacturer has optimized its supply chain, and a consumer transaction controls settlement all along the supply chain. That is the essence of scan-based trading, or SBT for short.

This is a drastically different world than the one we’re living in today. Supply chains today are relatively inefficient, resulting in overstocks, out-of-stocks, excess inventory (and subsequent markdowns), and money lost to out-of-date merchandise. SBT intends to address these various inefficiencies by extending the just-in-time concept to the retailer’s shelf. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette put it this way:

We believe that the next wave in supply chain management or B2B is about to be rolled out. We expect the next wave to reduce retailers net investment in inventory to near zero, pull inventory out of the channel reducing markdown pressures and transaction costs, and substantially reduce out of stocks.

Basically, in SBT, retailers pay the manufacturer for the merchandise only after it has been scanned at the point-of-sale cash register. The retailer doesn’t own the goods in its stores, or its warehouses. Obviously, there are many issues to solve, not the least of which is, what to do about shoplifting? Alert SNS reader John Gehring asked the following questions about SBT. I provide what answers I can.

Do suppliers actually get paid 30-60 days after the sale is made?

Payment is generally made a good deal more quickly after the sale using SBT. That’s part of the upside for the supplier. There are actually three concepts involved in SBT: Scan-based Settlement, Scan-based Replenishment, and Scan-based Promotion. Each speeds up the ability of the supply chain to respond to events at retail such as out-of-stocks and promotions, while getting money to the supplier much faster. See the PWC white paper link at the end of this article for more information.

Will there finally be a backlash against retailers adopting this policy?

It’s hard to say. The retailers own the customer and that won’t change. That’s a pretty big hammer. I think, however, that if the supply chain can get efficient enough and responsive enough, there will be upside for everyone. The key is going to be the demand chain info flowing back to the supplier. This info is gold, gold that ACNielsen has been selling for years. If retailers can make it work in their supply chains, and manufacturers can use it to plan demand, everyone will be happy. But this is by no means a slam dunk. There was a lot of activity back in ’99 on SBT, with pilots and tests, but now I think folks are waiting to see what WalMart does with it before going crazy on it. Nonetheless, grocery retailers such as H. E. Butt, A&P, Safeway and Schnucks, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, including Proctor & Gamble, Gillette, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola have all tested SBT.

Plus there’s plenty of savings for the manufacturer. Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream uses SBT in more than 1,500 stores, and has been since 1994. But they haven’t had to add any vehicles in spite of recording 10 percent to 15 percent increases in volume each year. Here’s what the Grocery Manufacturers of America pilot tests found:

Will the resulting margin erosion make sales to some retailers unprofitable, especially for lower-volume suppliers?

SBT won’t work for everyone, initially. But I think it will eventually be the way of the world. The key to making SBT work is for there actually to be no margin erosion. Manufacturers make up for any price pressure by becoming more efficient. In addition, there is a recognition that several of the traditional retailers’ costs need to be rolled in to the manufacturers’ margin.

How will the huge increase in accounts receivable days outstanding look to suppliers’ lenders?

Lenders have to be clued in for SBT to work. The point of SBT is to reduce the number of days between manufacturer and sale, so this could make things better, accounts-receivable-wise, rather than worse.

Where is the opportunity to make money on this "pain" being inflicted by retailers?

While at first blush it may seem to be all pain for suppliers, I don’t think it will necessarily be a one-sided proposition. Both sides have to win for SBT to take over the world. Nonetheless, supply chain enablers are going to be the big growth B2B firms, because of SBT and many other factors. In order for SBT to work, all kinds of new accounting, tracking, financing, logistics, and decision support systems need to be implemented. All that needs consulting and applications.

It all really boils down to WWWD: What Will Wal-Mart Do? The secretive retailing giant is playing it close to the vest, but indications are that, after a rocky start, its SBT experiment is yielding double-digit same-store sales growth. The company has said selling 100 percent of its inventory before paying suppliers is a reasonable three-year goal.

Regardless of how the gorillas go, there are many obstacles to SBT, some technological, some process-oriented, and some trust-oriented. Nonetheless, businesses that sell into retail need to be aware of this trend, especially for products that are direct store-delivered, a segment where SBT seems to be taking hold.

I’ve just re-ranked my list of important Internet trends in the TrendSpot .

I’m speaking at the Designing a Handheld Computing Strategy for Your Enterprise conference in Rosemont, IL, Tuesday, June 19. My topic is The Next Wireless Killer Apps: Will You Have to Have It?

I’ve been pretty down on the Internet appliance market because I just don’t see the appeal with cheap PCs and new Net devices on the horizon. Nonetheless, Cahners In-Stat Group predicts a 101 percent compound annual growth rate between 2000 and 2005 for sales of 20 million units and a total of $1.3 billion by 2005. Most of the growth will be outside of North America and Europe, where the PC market is well-developed.Newsfactor NUA Surveys

Alert SNS reader Mike Todey sent along a reference to incredible data base research at the University of Rochester (NY). At a recent conference on lasers and optics in Baltimore, researchers reported that they had invented a way to use light to do a database search of 50 items in a way that can’t be duplicated in any particle-based computer. Rather than relying on a digital system that uses strings of 1s and 0s to encode data, the Rochester machine is analog. It works on a simple principle discovered in the 19th century: When different waves of sound or light combine, they create unique patterns, called interference.BusinessWeek

Insight Research says small and medium-sized businesses really want fixed broadband wireless services, and projects revenues will reach $3 billion next year, 93 percent from small and medium-sized businesses.NUA Surveys

Can’t Get Enough of ME?

In the unlikely event that you want more of my opinions, I’ve started a Weblog. It’s the fashionable thing for pundits to do, and I’m doing it too. A Weblog is a datestamped collection of somewhat random thoughts and ideas assembled on a Web page. If you’d like to subject the world to your thoughts, as I do, you can create your own Weblog. You need to have a Web site that allows you FTP access, and the free software from www.blogger.com . This allows you to right click on a Web page and append your pithy thoughts to your Weblog.